Newsweeklies Considered, Again [Update]

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By John Koblin

April 4, 2008 | 10:17 a.m.

In the wake of 100+ job cuts at Newsweek, the Journal's Rebecca Dana parachutes down into the Newsweek and Time buildings to find out what's happening. Jon Meacham tells her that being an editor these days is very much like being a manager of a company who has to move bodies and "control costs."

"Like any managers anywhere, we looked at a revenue picture that could be more thrilling and said, 'How can we accomplish two or three things?,' " Mr. Meacham said in an interview. " 'How can we control costs? How can we have money to rebuild and hire new voices and new reporting talent? And how can we do that in the service of what we've been trying to do with the magazine of the last year-and-a-half, which is make it more serious and try to make ourselves indispensable to the conversation?' "

Mr. Meacham believes you do that in Newseek by adding content in the magazine (30 percent more text and fewer pictures since he took over, he said). Time editor Richard Stengel, by contrast, seems to believe you do it by making the magazine easier to navigate, a "guide through the chaos."

In any event, Mr. Meacham has been thinking through this problem for a few months now. There was the moment back in February when the Observer visited the Columbia j-school and Mr. Meacham told a crowd of students that he had no idea how to make the magazine appealing to young, smart people. "And I just don't know how to do it," he said, "so if you've got any ideas, tell me."

UPDATE: Mr. Meacham may need ideas for the newsstand too! Jeff Bercovici crunched some numbers this morning and found that since Newsweek's redesign last October, its newsstand sales are down 24 percent from the same period a year earlier. Time, meanwhile, is down 16.8 percent.